How social investing is changing the way Australians trade

The moomoo app also offers a feature called Paper Portfolio, which is a “sandbox market” where investors can test ideas with a notional portfolio instead of with their own money. The portfolio draws on real‑time real inputs from market and performance.

“In the community, users are able to share their paper portfolios in and we see whole conversations, comments and engagement around someone’s strategy,” Rogan says.

However, investors can’t share their actual real-money portfolios. This is to stop what’s known as mirror trading – where an investor matches another investors’ share trades.

“That’s not the approach moomoo takes as we believe investing should be more personal – every trader will have different goals, situations and appetite for risk, and so their investment approach should reflect that, not the trading behaviour of someone else whose needs and objectives may be totally different,” Rogan says.

Investors can also run polls to get the opinions of a wide range of other investors in the moomoo community.

Renewables strategy

Rogan says a good example of how social trading can help investors make better decisions is around stagflation – the unfavourable combination of rising inflation coupled with a period of economic stagnation and unemployment growth.

“With signs in the global and national economy pointing to a period of possible stagflation, the idea was raised and discussed in the moomoo community with the outcome being how to best prepare for stagflation, should it eventuate,” he says.

“One strategy being to invest in renewables, to offset the impact of higher oil prices.”

Share market chat groups have attracted regulator scrutiny in recent years in Australia thanks to concerns that they were being used to overhype share prices, known as “pumping and dumping”.

But Rogan says that isn’t a risk on moomoo because the site has set standards for posts and general behaviour, all posts go through three review stages before publishing and every post is reviewed by a moomoo team member.

“Because the community is built into moomoo, the advantage of the moomoo community over Hot Copper or other investment discussions is that the features and therefore conversations can be a lot richer,” Rogan says.

“In our other regions, we’ve also seen listed companies join the community, as a way to engage in a dialogue with investors. For example, we’ve had companies present their earnings reports into the community through member live-streams.”

None of the social investing features and the AI tools offered by moomoo negate the need for investors to do their own research and make their own decisions.

“But as one of the inputs into an investor’s investment decision, the community can be a fantastic resource,” Rogan says.

It helps expose investors to more strategies, and to more companies they may not have considered themselves, which not only helps to improve their share trading literacy, but also potentially helps them to diversify their portfolio.

Moomoo is Australia’s hottest new share trading platform for active traders.

• Global investor community – 18m users sharing insights and supporting one another.
• Deeper intel with customised insights – Inform your trades with cutting-edge, personalised insights.
• Leading global news and data – Enjoy real-time AU and US market data plus financial news from Bloomberg, Dow Jones, Benzinga and more.
• Invest in AU and US – Trade shares and ETFs on the ASX, Cboe, Nasdaq and NYSE.
• Trade smarter with advanced tech – professional-level tools, data and insights available to every trader.

In Australia, securities services in moomoo are offered by Futu Securities (Australia) Ltd (AFSL 224663) regulated by ASIC.